After discovering he's not really black like the rest of his family, likable dimwit Navin Johnson sets off on a hilarious misadventure that takes him from rags to riches and back again. The slaphappy jerk strikes it rich, but life in the fast lane isn't all it's cracked up to be and, in the end, all that really matters to Johnson is his true love.
In the post–World War II South, two families are pitted against a barbaric social hierarchy and an unrelenting landscape as they simultaneously fight the battle at home and the battle abroad.
The oldest son of a loving and strong family of black sharecroppers comes of age in the Depression-era South after his father is imprisoned for stealing food.
Sam Tucker, a cotton picker, in search of a better future for his family, decides to grow his own cotton crop. In the first year, the Tuckers battle disease, a flood, and a jealous neighbor. Can they make it as farmers?
Accused barn burner and conman Ben Quick arrives in a small Mississippi town and quickly ingratiates himself with its richest family, the Varners.
Purehearted teen Lazzaro is content living as a sharecropper in rural Italy, but an unlikely friendship with the marquise’s son will change his world.
A gay man living through the HIV/AIDS crisis reflects upon his recent history of loss with the help of his grandmother, who tells him a story of her own trauma and loss during the Jim Crow-era South.
Shiftless Jeeter Lester and his family of sharecroppers live in rural Georgia where their ancestors were once wealthy planters. Their slapstick existence is threatened by a bank's plans to take over the land for more profitable farming.
Lonnie Wilson returns to small southern hometown after spending six years on the chain-gang for killing Colonel Ben Marquand's son in an automobile accident. He revives his love affair with Melinda Marquand........
By the start of World War II, Paul Robeson had given up his lucrative mainstream work to participate in more socially progressive film and stage productions. Robeson committed his support to Paul Strand and Leo Hurwitz’s political semidocumentary Native Land. With Robeson’s narration and songs, this beautifully shot and edited film exposes violations of Americans’ civil liberties and is a call to action for exploited workers around the country. Scarcely shown since its debut, Native Land represents Robeson’s shift from narrative cinema to the leftist documentaries that would define the final chapter of his controversial film career.
Although Dave (LeVar Burton) and his family are poor sharecroppers in the Deep South in the 1930s, this 15-year-old's problem is shared by teenagers today: he stands with one foot in adulthood and the other in childhood. "Almos' A Man", yet still treated like a child, he struggles for an identity. There's one thing, one symbol of manhood, Dave thinks, that could guarantee him instant respect: a gun.
The Weavers are share-croppers who confront their landlord with their tale of woe only to find he is in money trouble too. He also has a wastrel son and a socialite wife who wants a divorce. He begs the Weavers to trade places with him and fix things up.
A reporter risks lynching to prove that share croppers are being cheated.
